Yesterday President Biden signed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, described by the White House as “a once-in-a-generation investment in our nation’s infrastructure and competitiveness.” To celebrate, here’s a poem by Tennessee poet Will Allen Dromgoole,” who lived at a time (1860-1934) when such poems were regularly published in daily newspapers and when, as a result, poetry enjoyed a much higher readership than it does today.
The poem is somewhat hokey–Dromgoole sounds like she churned out poetry by the barrel, writing over 8000 poems in her lifetime–but it has a nice sentiment to it, very much in the spirit of Biden’s accomplishment. It shows how popular poetry–which is to say, poetry that could be understood by just about anyone–contributed to America’s civic religion in the early 20th century. The central tenet of that religion was that people should care more about the good of society and about future generations than about themselves.
Given that the poem is about building bridges, it also reminds us that America used to be more optimistic about its future. It used to have less difficulty imagining grand construction projects.
The Bridge Builder By Will Allen Dromgoole
An old man going a lone highway, Came, at the evening cold and gray, To a chasm vast and deep and wide. Through which was flowing a sullen tide The old man crossed in the twilight dim, The sullen stream had no fear for him; But he turned when safe on the other side And built a bridge to span the tide.
“Old man,” said a fellow pilgrim near, “You are wasting your strength with building here; Your journey will end with the ending day, You never again will pass this way; You’ve crossed the chasm, deep and wide, Why build this bridge at evening tide?”
The builder lifted his old gray head; “Good friend, in the path I have come,” he said, “There followed after me to-day A youth whose feet must pass this way. This chasm that has been as naught to me To that fair-haired youth may a pitfall be; He, too, must cross in the twilight dim; Good friend, I am building this bridge for him!”
Fritz Eichenberg, Catherine Earnshaw haunted by regret
Monday
Adam Gallinsky, who teaches “leadership and ethics” at Columbia Business School, has written an eye-opening Washington Post article on the role of “anticipated regret” in vaccination decisions. Understanding the psychology at work, he says, “can help us get more shots into arms, removing one of the final obstacles to controlling the virus.” As I thought about the fear of feeling regret, I looked for literary examples and settled on, of all things, Wuthering Heights. I realize this is a stretch but hear me out.
First, however, to Gallinsky, who contends that positive incentives don’t necessarily work with the vaccine hesitant. That’s because, in their cost-benefit calculations, they fear the regret that comes with doing something wrong more than they fear the regret that might arise from doing nothing at all. To illustrate, Gallinsky cites the work of a Nobel-winning economist:
Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize in economics for his work on decision-making — have demonstrated these tendencies in a series of experiments. For example, Kahneman found that people anticipate feeling more regret if they were to lose money by switching to a new stock vs. taking a loss on their current stock. And this regret is maximally intensified when we freely choose to take action— we are not ordered or coerced — and when it involves new or experimental activities. For example, Kahneman found that people anticipate more regret when imagining an accident that occurs while driving home along a new route compared with driving on one’s normal route. Anticipated regret is why people often prefer to stand still rather than move forward.
Gallinsky says that calculations often change, however, with vaccine mandates, which are proving to be overwhelmingly effective. (Gallinsky points out that, despite fierce initial resistance among New York police and predictions of mass resignations, in the end no more the three dozen out of 35,000 officers refused to get the shot.) “When people don’t feel the weight of making their own choice,” Gallinsky points out, “they aren’t as tormented by the anticipated negative outcomes of their decision.”
Gallinsky adds that mandates should be accompanied by “empathic firmness.” “When people sense that those enforcing a policy are listening to them,” he says, “they are less likely to shut down.”
Now to literature, where one finds many characters who take a seemingly safe and familiar route rather than an adventurous one (not that getting vaccinated is all that adventurous), only to regret it later. I single out Emily Bronte’s headstrong Catherine Earnshaw, who marries another member of the gentry rather than her soulmate Heathcliff. Anticipating regret if she makes the wild and unconventional choice, she chooses instead the familiar one, only to find herself deeply unhappy. Because she is a strong personality, she makes everyone around her miserable as well, and the household is in constant turmoil until she dies.
I realize now, in applying the work, that I disagree slightly with Gallinsky. He makes it sound as though it is only because the vaccine is unfamiliar that some are unwilling to take it. He doesn’t mention the positive rewards that come with not taking it. In Catherine’s case, the reward is a comfortable and familiar upper-class life. In the case of vaccine resisters, the reward is getting to feel both superior too and victimized by the Enlightenment world of science and medical expertise. One gets to rail against liberal elites and imagine them as frauds. In other words, many vaccine hesitaters anticipate regret at leaving a closed ecosystem that they have committed themselves to. Leaving would be more emotionally charged than selling stock or taking a different route home.
Sacrificing that ecosystem for mere health seems a poor tradeoff, even when health is no further away than the nearest pharmacy.
It appears a poor tradeoff, anyway, until one is hospitalized with Covid, at which point the medical profession appears far more attractive. Many find themselves experiencing actual regret at this stage, as Catherine does with her marriage. Unfortunately, by this point it’s too late.
Interestingly, like a number of the vaccine resisters, Catherine tries to have it both ways: she wants to have her husband and her lover at the same time. (Linton and Heathcliff, understandably, are less enthused by the idea.) For their part, the anti-vaccine crowd want to rail against doctors until they want these same doctors to cure them, just as they want the “socialist” programs of Medicare and Obamacare to cover their medical bills. For that matter, they don’t acknowledge how vaccines have saved us from small pox, polio, the measles, chicken pox, mumps, etc, etc. Like Catherine, many behave like entitled children as they fail to take responsibility for supporting the institutions that support them.
Commentator Tom Nichols, who describes himself as a Never Trump conservative, plays the role of the no-nonsense Nelly Dean, housekeeper at Wuthering Heights who is impatient with Catherine’s histrionic fits, when he calls America “an unserious nation threatened by millions of spoiled, stupid adult children.” Real adults act responsibly–which in this case means taking steps to protect themselves and others. The gyrations of anticipated regret look awfully silly when a safe and effective vaccine is ready to hand.
I reread George Eliot’s Adam Bede recently for the first time in decades and fell in love again with the itinerant Methodist preacher Dinah Morris. I share today her sermon on the Hayslope village green, which we watch through the eyes of a stranger.
It’s particularly interesting to read Dinah’s sermon at a time when church attendance in the United States is dramatically dropping. I don’t know if this is because people are turned off by the politicization of religion or for some other reason, but I find it sad that people are losing access to the spiritual nourishment that religion can provide. We need people like Dinah to help us get back in touch with the divine. Here’s the first half of Dinah’s sermon:
“A sweet woman,” the stranger said to himself, “but surely nature never meant her for a preacher.”
Perhaps he was one of those who think that nature has theatrical properties and, with the considerate view of facilitating art and psychology, “makes up” her characters, so that there may be no mistake about them. But Dinah began to speak.
“Dear friends,” she said in a clear but not loud voice “let us pray for a blessing.”
She closed her eyes, and hanging her head down a little continued in the same moderate tone, as if speaking to some one quite near her: “Savior of sinners! When a poor woman laden with sins, went out to the well to draw water, she found Thee sitting at the well. She knew Thee not; she had not sought Thee; her mind was dark; her life was unholy. But Thou didst speak to her, Thou didst teach her, Thou didst show her that her life lay open before Thee, and yet Thou wast ready to give her that blessing which she had never sought. Jesus, Thou art in the midst of us, and Thou knowest all men: if there is any here like that poor woman—if their minds are dark, their lives unholy—if they have come out not seeking Thee, not desiring to be taught; deal with them according to the free mercy which Thou didst show to her. Speak to them, Lord, open their ears to my message, bring their sins to their minds, and make them thirst for that salvation which Thou art ready to give.
“Lord, Thou art with Thy people still: they see Thee in the night-watches, and their hearts burn within them as Thou talkest with them by the way. And Thou art near to those who have not known Thee: open their eyes that they may see Thee—see Thee weeping over them, and saying ‘Ye will not come unto me that ye might have life’—see Thee hanging on the cross and saying, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do’—see Thee as Thou wilt come again in Thy glory to judge them at the last. Amen.”
Dinah opened her eyes again and paused, looking at the group of villagers, who were now gathered rather more closely on her right hand.
“Dear friends,” she began, raising her voice a little, “you have all of you been to church, and I think you must have heard the clergyman read these words: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor.’ Jesus Christ spoke those words—he said he came TO PREACH THE GOSPEL TO THE POOR. I don’t know whether you ever thought about those words much, but I will tell you when I remember first hearing them. It was on just such a sort of evening as this, when I was a little girl, and my aunt as brought me up took me to hear a good man preach out of doors, just as we are here. I remember his face well: he was a very old man, and had very long white hair; his voice was very soft and beautiful, not like any voice I had ever heard before. I was a little girl and scarcely knew anything, and this old man seemed to me such a different sort of a man from anybody I had ever seen before that I thought he had perhaps come down from the sky to preach to us, and I said, ‘Aunt, will he go back to the sky to-night, like the picture in the Bible?’
“That man of God was Mr. Wesley, who spent his life in doing what our blessed Lord did—preaching the Gospel to the poor—and he entered into his rest eight years ago. I came to know more about him years after, but I was a foolish thoughtless child then, and I remembered only one thing he told us in his sermon. He told us as ‘Gospel’ meant ‘good news.’ The Gospel, you know, is what the Bible tells us about God.
“Think of that now! Jesus Christ did really come down from heaven, as I, like a silly child, thought Mr. Wesley did; and what he came down for was to tell good news about God to the poor. Why, you and me, dear friends, are poor. We have been brought up in poor cottages and have been reared on oatcake, and lived coarse; and we haven’t been to school much, nor read books, and we don’t know much about anything but what happens just round us. We are just the sort of people that want to hear good news. For when anybody’s well off, they don’t much mind about hearing news from distant parts; but if a poor man or woman’s in trouble and has hard work to make out a living, they like to have a letter to tell ’em they’ve got a friend as will help ’em. To be sure, we can’t help knowing something about God, even if we’ve never heard the Gospel, the good news that our Saviour brought us. For we know everything comes from God: don’t you say almost every day, ‘This and that will happen, please God,’ and ‘We shall begin to cut the grass soon, please God to send us a little more sunshine’? We know very well we are altogether in the hands of God. We didn’t bring ourselves into the world, we can’t keep ourselves alive while we’re sleeping; the daylight, and the wind, and the corn, and the cows to give us milk—everything we have comes from God. And he gave us our souls and put love between parents and children, and husband and wife. But is that as much as we want to know about God? We see he is great and mighty, and can do what he will: we are lost, as if we was struggling in great waters, when we try to think of him.
“But perhaps doubts come into your mind like this: Can God take much notice of us poor people? Perhaps he only made the world for the great and the wise and the rich. It doesn’t cost him much to give us our little handful of victual and bit of clothing; but how do we know he cares for us any more than we care for the worms and things in the garden, so as we rear our carrots and onions? Will God take care of us when we die? And has he any comfort for us when we are lame and sick and helpless? Perhaps, too, he is angry with us; else why does the blight come, and the bad harvests, and the fever, and all sorts of pain and trouble? For our life is full of trouble, and if God sends us good, he seems to send bad too. How is it? How is it?
“Ah, dear friends, we are in sad want of good news about God; and what does other good news signify if we haven’t that? For everything else comes to an end, and when we die we leave it all. But God lasts when everything else is gone. What shall we do if he is not our friend?”
Then Dinah told how the good news had been brought, and how the mind of God towards the poor had been made manifest in the life of Jesus, dwelling on its lowliness and its acts of mercy.
“So you see, dear friends,” she went on, “Jesus spent his time almost all in doing good to poor people; he preached out of doors to them, and he made friends of poor workmen, and taught them and took pains with them. Not but what he did good to the rich too, for he was full of love to all men, only he saw as the poor were more in want of his help. So he cured the lame and the sick and the blind, and he worked miracles to feed the hungry because, he said, he was sorry for them; and he was very kind to the little children and comforted those who had lost their friends; and he spoke very tenderly to poor sinners that were sorry for their sins.
“Ah, wouldn’t you love such a man if you saw him—if he were here in this village? What a kind heart he must have! What a friend he would be to go to in trouble! How pleasant it must be to be taught by him.
“Well, dear friends, who WAS this man? Was he only a good man—a very good man, and no more—like our dear Mr. Wesley, who has been taken from us?…He was the Son of God—’in the image of the Father,’ the Bible says; that means, just like God, who is the beginning and end of all things—the God we want to know about. So then, all the love that Jesus showed to the poor is the same love that God has for us. We can understand what Jesus felt, because he came in a body like ours and spoke words such as we speak to each other. We were afraid to think what God was before—the God who made the world and the sky and the thunder and lightning. We could never see him; we could only see the things he had made; and some of these things was very terrible, so as we might well tremble when we thought of him. But our blessed Savior has showed us what God is in a way us poor ignorant people can understand; he has showed us what God’s heart is, what are his feelings towards us.”
It stands to reason that, following their war with America’s scientists and doctors, America’s rightwing would next go after teachers and school librarians. One assault is occurring in the Goddard School District in Kansas, which has directed its school libraries not to check out 29 books, including Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and August Wilson’s 1987 Pulitzer-prize winning drama Fences.
KMUW reports that Julie Cannizzo, Goddard’s assistant superintendent for academic affairs in Goddard, sent out the following e-mail along with the list:
“At this time, the district is not in a position to know if the books contained on this list meet our educational goals or not,” Cannizzo wrote in the email. “Additionally, we need to gain a better understanding of the processes utilized to select books for our school libraries.
“For these reasons, please do not allow any of these books to be checked out while we are in the process of gathering more information. If a book on this list is currently checked out, please do (not) allow it to be checked out again once it’s returned.”
According to KMUW, the e-mail also noted that
the district is assembling a committee to “rate the content of the books on the list” and to review the selection process. She did not say how long the process is expected to take.
Here’s the complete list:
#MurderTrending by Gretchen McNeil All Boys Aren’t Blue, George M. Johnson Anger Is a Gift, Mark Oshiro Black Girl Unlimited, Echo Brown Blended, Sharon M. Draper Crank, Ellen Hopkins Fences, August Wilson A Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel Gender Queer, Maia Kobabe Heavy, Kaise Laymon Lawn Boy, Jonathan Evison Lily and Dunkin, Donna Gephart Living Dead Girl, Elizabeth Scott Monday’s Not Coming, Tiffany D. Jackson Out of Darkness, Ashley Hope Perez Satanism, Tamara L. Roleff The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime that Changed Their Lives, Dashka Slater The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, Heidi W. Durrow The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood The Handmaid’s Tale: The Graphic Novel, adapted by Renee Nault The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky The Testaments, Margaret Atwood They Called Themselves the K.K.K.: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group, Susan Campbell Bertoletti The Book Is Gay, James Dawson This One Summer (graphic novel), Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki Trans Mission: My Quest to a Beard, Alex Bertie
Given the apparent success of Virginia gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin’s attack on Morrison’s Beloved, I fully expect such lists to become the norm in Republican districts across the country. The trend also makes a lot of sense: if your intention is to take down America’s Enlightenment project, then few things stand in your way more than public education, public libraries, and novels.
In some ways, I’m amazed that teachers and school libraries have gotten away with offering these books for as long as they have. Literature, as I said in a recent post, is like a loaded gun, with the potential to shatter myths and stereotypes. For parents who want to turn out young people exactly like themselves—who think and behave exactly like they do—novels and poems are the enemy. Educators have been handling literary dynamite for a while now, and until recently, parental indifference—at least the indifference of certain parents—has been their friend. English teachers have been seen as just teaching stories, and what harm can stories do?
All that may be about to change as we see educators (I include librarians under that label) suffering the same attacks as medical professionals. Who knew that recommending a mask to protect others would suddenly have angry citizens shouting, “We know where you live!”? Doctors and nurses, like climate scientists before them, have learned that they can’t stay aloof from politics. When your very approach to the world is seen as political, then you have to figure out how to be political in return. The key is to be smart about it.
In some ways, the problem is that educators have become more responsive to kids’ needs, as have the authors of many of the books being banned. When I was a child and a teenager, our teachers didn’t concern themselves with the books we needed to negotiate life’s challenges. They assigned canonical texts which, because they had been written long ago, weren’t seen as having much to do with actual life. Literature was a comfortably boring subject.
Now, however, we are living in the golden age of Young Adult Fiction, and one finds novels exploring every aspect of teenage life—and often getting attacked and even banned as a result. Add to this how much more complicated the world has become and the conditions are ripe for parents lashing out. They are afraid of the world their children are entering, even as their children are hungry for the information that these novels provide.
I wrote recently about a Texas legislator compiling a list of 800+ books that he wants investigated, including John Irving’s Cider House Rules. He’ll want banned any books that
contain material that might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex or convey that a student, by virtue of their race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.
To that story we can now add another, this one in northern Virginia, where school board members want books not only banned but burned. The Washington Post reports,
Shortly after the election result in Virginia, a pair of conservative school board members in the same state proposed not just banning certain books deemed to be sexually explicit, but burning them.
As the Fredericksburg Free-Lance Star reported Tuesday:
Two board members, Courtland representative Rabih Abuismail and Livingston representative Kirk Twigg, said they would like to see the removed books burned.
“I think we should throw those books in a fire,” Abuismail said, and Twigg said he wants to “see the books before we burn them so we can identify within our community that we are eradicating this bad stuff.”
Abuismail reportedly added that allowing one particular book to remain on the shelves even briefly meant the schools “would rather have our kids reading gay pornography than about Christ.”
Do you remember the good old days when Republicans excoriated a publisher for choosing not to continue publishing certain obscure Doctor Seuss books for their racist caricatures. Lambasting liberals for “cancel culture” was all the rage then. America’s rightwing extremists, it’s now clear, have never believed in free speech. They’re willing to allow only speech that agrees with them.
Judge Walter Kurtz, my tennis partner and a decorated Vietnam vet, joked the other day about his children calling him on Memorial Day. “You’re supposed to call me on Veterans Day,” he tells them. “Do you want me dead?”
On Memorial Day we honor our fallen military, on Veterans Day those who are still alive.
World War I veteran Siegfried Sassoon has a powerful memory poem where he contrasts life before and after he witnessed death in the trenches. The fact that, in the second stanza, he sounds like an old man, even though he was only 31 when he wrote the poem, tells us all we need to know. Death has ripped away his innocence and, while it has made him wiser and stronger, it has also made him bitter. Whereas once he reveled /gay and feckless as a colt/ Out in the fields, with morning in the may,” now he asks to be brought
the darkness and the nightingale; Dim wealds of vanished summer, peace of home, And silence; and the faces of my friends.
I’m thinking that poet Dylan Thomas was inspired by Sassoon’s childhood memories, echoing them in his “Poem in October” (which I wrote about recently). Sassoon was an admirer of Wales, so maybe that played a role in the Welsh poet’s allusion.
And as with Thomas, the mood turns dark. Sassoon isn’t certain that he will in fact achieve peace of home, silence, and memory of his friends. His heart is “heavy-laden” and his dreams are burning away.
Memory By Siegfried Sassoon
When I was young my heart and head were light, And I was gay and feckless as a colt Out in the fields, with morning in the may, Wind on the grass, wings in the orchard bloom. O thrilling sweet, my joy, when life was free And all the paths led on from hawthorn-time Across the caroling meadows into June.
But now my heart is heavy-laden. I sit Burning my dreams away beside the fire: For death has made me wise and bitter and strong; And I am rich in all that I have lost. O starshine on the fields of long-ago, Bring me the darkness and the nightingale; Dim wealds of vanished summer, peace of home, And silence; and the faces of my friends.
As I continue to reflect on Thor Tangeras’s Literature and Transformation: A Narrative Study of Life-Changing Reading Experiences (see my previous posts here, here and here), I’ve just had a realization: if I respond so strongly to Tangeras analyzing life-changing reading experiences, it’s because it’s what I used to do with my students. It’s the part of my teaching that I miss the most.
Today I report on Tangas’s interview of a Norwegian psychotherapist who said that an Ingrid Hagerup poem changed the way she understood her parents’ constant quarreling. I also helped launch her decision to study psychology. Here’s the poem:
Episode
Theirs was not a quarrel, not in the slightest. Of course not, he said. – Thank you for the meal. And though their polite words were uttered lightly They gleamed with old hate under icy seal.
You are welcome, was all that she replied. She pushed the chair up to the table, intending With narrow mouth and lips so firmly tied To build a fence behind her words, unbending.
They stood silent for a moment, on guard, Both searching for new weapons, the most searing phrase conceivable, to be thrust so hard, A poisoned dagger-blade through love’s woof tearing.
She felt venomous words well up inside. A yellow delight at the thought of harming Him rose up in her so ruthless and snide. Then fingers fumbled through his hair, disarming
Her – and now, suddenly, her eyes were filling In a powerless, inexplicable pain. She sensed deep beneath all the hate so chilling The tensed cord from his heart to hers again.
Esther said that the poem, which she read in school as a 17-year-old, it gave her insight into “the complexity and contraries of my parents’ terrible marriage.” She recalls the moment with Tangeras::
I had an instant illumination: ‘Yes, this is them! Two forsaken people.’ ‘Oh, my God!, is that how it is?’ And I also thought: ‘So I am not the only one to have experienced something like this. It can’t be just them two who are like that. It must be universal.’ Yes, I realized that this experience must be common to all people. All of a sudden I could see them as they were, as human beings. As two vulnerable people. That there was a reason why they were like that. And that there was a depth there; something went on beneath the surface behavior. I could see this, because the poem describes precisely how they would act….
A realization went through me: ‘poor mum and dad. They must be suffering so.’ The poem helped me over – into that experience.
And further on:
All this I began to understand then, although that would take many years and I had to move out and start my own life. Which I did as soon as I could. Because it was still a burden to live in the conflict zone between my parents. Her silence and anger, and having to listen to all her moaning and complaining about how awful he was. He was almost frightened of his wife, he was. And she would scream at him what a coward he was. We had to cover our ears on occasions, to protect ourselves.
The turning point in the poem occurs when the wife sees the husband fumbling with his hair:
Thor: In the poem it says ‘and suddenly …” It’s the language of the body. He is despairing. Esther: When he, he puts his hand to his head, yes, and strokes his fingers through his hair. Then suddenly she becomes aware that he is not out to hurt her. He doesn’t understand much either, and really he feels quite helpless, doesn’t he. And so she no longer feels the urge to say the poisonous things she had intended to.
The metaphor of the tensed cord also leads to a fascinating insight:
Thor: What about that tensed cord? It can only be pulled so far? Esther: Yes, but that’s when they feel – and this is something that I only thought much later, not when I first read it – what she feels then is the emotional tie between the two, which is a tie that holds them, it has not been torn asunder despite all the pain they have undergone. And that is what I realized was the case with my parents too…Thor: I find it fascinating how she has this sudden insight in the poem, and you have a sudden insight about your parents when reading this. Esther: They were in need of compassion. That’s what I suddenly understood. They weren’t to blame for it! There was love there. And this love was very hard to understand for a young person. Is this love, all the shouting and the silences and the black, black moods? Can there really be something warm, true goodness, underneath it all? Yes, there was. And that’s when I realized: ‘There is a good reason why they are together.’ It has helped me ever since. When I have been working with couples who apparently hate each other’s guts, when one of them screams: ‘I hate you!’ – I never believe that to be the case. That affect is a form of camouflage emotion. ‘Deep below hatred and cold’ there is that emotional chord that binds them.
The truth delivered by poetry never ceases to amaze me.
I’ve written a couple of times about Glenn Youngkin’s attack on Beloved (here and here), which may have helped him win the Virginia governorship, but I want to make one final point. Because Toni Morrison’s novel is in fact social dynamite, it makes sense that those “tap-dancing” with white supremacy (that’s the phrasing of MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart) would be disturbed when their children are assigned it.
But at least those parents acknowledge that stories are powerful. I saw historian Michael Beschloss the other night on MSNBC observe that the incident is overblown because Beloved is only fiction. In saying so, he underestimates the disruptive potential of novels. Indeed, Beloved is meant to disturb readers, Black as well as White. Great literature is often great because it disturbs.
As I reflect on this, an interchange from the Lawrence Kasdan film Grand Canyon (1991) comes to mind, one that I mention in my book. Danny Glover, in the role of auto mechanic, is confronted by a gun-wielding gang leader while attempting to help stranded motorist Kevin Kline. Asked by the man whether he respects him or not, Glover replies, “You ain’t got the gun, we ain’t having this conversation.” One reason why schools are having conversations about Beloved (and why certain schools have also banned Morrison’s Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon) is because Morrison’s fiction is like a loaded gun that could go off at any moment, shattering complacency.
This is a point made by a recent Washington Post column, written before the Virginia election. After reading about the boy—now a Republican operative—who “gave up” on the novel because it was “gross” and hard to handle, African American columnist Cristine Emba recalls her own high school encounter with it:
I was also asked to read Beloved in a high school English class, also in Virginia — Richmond, to be precise. It was a hard read. You felt bad. It was also an illuminating corrective, studied against the Virginia backdrop of Robert E. Lee worship, Stonewall Jackson fetishization, and the plantations where enslaved people, we heard in our history classes, worked mostly happily for noble, caring masters.
Beloved in her case proved to be life-changing:
The novel taught me the power of literature, how words could transmit deep emotion. It did keep me up at night, because I was grappling with the pain of another person, wondering how someone could get to such a place, how people could do these things to one another. The gory details of the book fled my mind in the ensuing years. But the feeling — I never forgot it.
Rightwing Americans, Emba says, fear facing up to the past into which Morrison plunges them. And she does so in ways they never forget:
They fear it because examining our racial history, engaging in empathy for the enslaved and their descendants, might occasion a bit of guilt, a bit of knowledge that our national mythology (and its embedded racial hierarchy) is false, and a bit of responsibility to address racial inequality. It might occasion a bit of change, in short — and we can’t have that.
Youngkin’s promise to Virginiains, in other words, was “Elect me and your kids will never be forced to confront uncomfortable issues”:
In Virginia, all of this hides under a dad-like candidate in a fleecy vest, and in the beseeching eyes of a suburban mom protecting her little boy from books that made lawmakers turn “bright red with embarrassment.” But it is obvious from the segregationist history of “parents’ rights” discourse — and in the particular parts of curriculums most frequently opposed — what the real agenda is.
The problem with avoiding fearful issues is that we don’t so much escape them as push them under, which in turn renders them toxic. Facing up to them is how to break their hold over us, and doing so through novels is one of the most powerful means we have for doing so.
November is often a tough time for people who grapple with depression, but many of the poems about the season at least let them know they’re not alone. I’ve shared dark autumn poems by Mallarme and Mary Oliver in the past (here) and have a couple more poems to add to the list.
First, there’s the 19th century poet Thomas Hood brightening up November’s dark aspects with a playful final punchline:
November By Thomas Hood
No sun – no moon! No morn – no noon – No dawn – no dusk – no proper time of day. No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease, No comfortable feel in any member – No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees, No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds! – November!
Amy Lowell has her own dark November moods, during which time she reports being abandoned by her own cat (!):
November By Amy Lowell
The vine leaves against the brick walls of my house, Are rusty and broken. Dead leaves gather under the pine-trees, The brittle boughs of lilac-bushes Sweep against the stars. And I sit under a lamp Trying to write down the emptiness of my heart. Even the cat will not stay with me, But prefers the rain Under the meagre shelter of a cellar window.
Finally, Rita Dove figures out how to handle the month in “November for Beginners.” The secret: step into the gloom, whether by memorizing “a gloomy line or two of German” or essentially telling the season to bring it on, with its rain and wind. There’s an echo in the poem of King Lear commanding the elements not to spare him:
You can dream of spring all you want, Dove tells us. In the meantime, however, embrace the darkness:
November for Beginners By Rita Dove
Snow would be the easy way out—that softening sky like a sigh of relief at finally being allowed to yield. No dice. We stack twigs for burning in glistening patches but the rain won’t give.
So we wait, breeding mood, making music of decline. We sit down in the smell of the past and rise in a light that is already leaving. We ache in secret, memorizing
a gloomy line or two of German. When spring comes we promise to act the fool. Pour, rain! Sail, wind with your cargo of zithers!
Today we remember our dead and turn back our clocks. Both are included in Dionisio D. Martinez’s “Standard Time: Novena for My Father,” a tender prayer poem directed to the speaker’s deceased father.
Early on, wind chimes remind the speaker of his parent, leading him to work “All Hallows Eve” and other names for the day into a little ditty. These thoughts of death lead him to Saint Francis, who in addition to welcoming birds embraced “Sister Death.” By not living in fear of death—this is what Martinez means by Francis “having nothing but faith in his hands”— Francis believed we could open ourselves fully to God.
Having sat all day with a statue of Francis, the poet no longer needs to hear the wind chimes to imagine his father as present. He thinks of Francis’s birds as dead souls (night birds), which
breathe music back into the wind chimes when the forecast calls for stillness.
I must admit to difficulties with the next two stanzas, even though I love some of the imagery. Here they are:
I still remember what you said about belief, how you laughed when I said I thought the world could carry the cross I’d carved around my shoulder and through my fist.
The world is busy with its clocks and its wind chimes and the night birds that never fly home once they learn the secret of exile.
Perhaps, thinking back to his disagreements with his father over belief, he now questions his need for tangible evidence. When he says, in the first of the stanzas, that the only thing he believed in was what he could carry on his shoulders and accomplish with his fist—he believed more in the crucifixion than the resurrection—his father laughed at him. Unlike the senior Martinez, the son doesn’t have St. Francis’s faith, which draws birds, not heavy world responsibilities, to his shoulders.
Similarly, if he is still obsessed with resetting clocks and finding signs of his father in wind chimes and imagined night birds, then he has yet to achieve the faith. But I’m still puzzled about what he means by “secret of exile,” even though I love the phrase. Is he saying that his father, once having flown to God, would not fly home again? And is the poet, having thought that he detected the presence of his father, now wondering if it just been an illusion? After all, why would a bird fly home after having discovered the secret of eternity?
The questioning takes me back to three successive Sundays after my eldest son died. Each time, as Julia and I stood atop the churchyard bluff looking down at where Justin had drowned, an osprey landed in the tree above us and stayed there until we left some twenty minutes later. It provided us comfort at a very dark time, a seeming sign from Justin, but I can understand Martinez’s doubts.
Incidentally, the 17th century metaphysical poet uses the same flown bird image to contrast the earthly and the spiritual in “They are all gone into the world of light”:
Dear, beauteous Death! the jewel of the just, Shining nowhere, but in the dark; What mysteries do lie beyond thy dust Could man outlook that mark!
He that hath found some fledg’d bird’s nest, may know At first sight, if the bird be flown; But what fair well or grove he sings in now, That is to him unknown.
Returning to Martinez’s poem, in the next stanza he emits an “almost musical sigh” after lighting a votive candle. If we have no other contact, maybe you can at least hear this, the poet says to his father. Then he launches unexpectedly into hell imagery.
Perhaps “all the souls in hell” represent materialist doubt in the divine—that’s partly what hell is for Dante—because Martinez indicates the weapons these souls use to plunge us into hell (“set the world on fire”) are mathematics and equations. Despite their efforts, however, they cannot prevail over the way we “cling to the last flame in the equation.” That flame could be both the candle Martinez lights before his father’s picture or and the Pentecostal flame, where the Holy Spirit entered us after Jesus departed the world.
In other words, when we lose a loved one and all the world is dark, when we doubt an afterlife because it makes no rational sense, some small flame of hope persists. Its ability to override our doubts is all the more impressive.
Standard Time: Novena for My Father
By Dionisio D. Martinez
We’re turning back the clocks tonight to live an hour longer. I suppose this is a useless ritual to you now.
Late October brings life to the wind chimes with that perpetually nocturnal music so reminiscent of you.
I memorize a small song, a seasonable dirge for the night that lives outside my window. I call each note by name: All Hallows Eve; All Saints Day; all the souls in my music pacing, talking to themselves.
All day I sit by the statue of Saint Francis of Assisi, birds on his shoulders, nothing but faith in his hands.
At dusk I return to the house you knew and a life you would probably understand. There are night birds waiting to breathe music back into the wind chimes when the forecast calls for stillness.
I still remember what you said about belief, how you laughed when I said I thought the world could carry the cross I’d carved around my shoulder and through my fist.
The world is busy with its clocks and its wind chimes and the night birds that never fly home once they learn the secret of exile.
I let out one sigh that is almost musical. I know you can hear this much. I take a small step back and picture you here before I light the last candle.
All the souls in hell couldn’t set this world on fire. Even if they prove that our lives are mathematically impossible, we will cling to the last flame in the equation.
